AI Summary
5 min readA single cryptic line in a leaked NSA document set off a years-long obsession for a cybersecurity researcher: “FAST 16: nothing to see here. Carry on.” The instruction was written in all caps, buried in a list of known malware threats that the NSA used to warn its own operators during hacking missions. Every other entry told agents to pull back or seek help. This one told them to look away. For Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, a researcher who goes by Jags and works for the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, the message was irresistible. “You can’t put that there,” he says. “It felt like bait.”
Jags is a self-described “cyber paleontologist” who digs up old malware and reverse-engineers how hackers broke into systems. He studies the invisible war that runs alongside conventional conflicts, a war fought with computer viruses rather than bombs. The fragment he found wasn’t even code—just six words. But it led him to a piece of malware so cunning that it may have targeted not just computers, but the human minds operating them.
The search for FAST 16
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:44) **The Invisible War** - Introduces the ongoing US-Iran conflict and the hidden cyber sabotage campaign against Iran's nuclear program.
- 2 (01:41) **The Cyber Paleontologist** - Introduces Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade (Jags), a security researcher who hunts for remnants of old cyber attacks.
- 3 (03:49) **The Mysterious Fragment: "Nothing to See Here"** - Jags finds a cryptic entry on an NSA leak list: "fast 16 nothing to see here carry on."
- 4 (06:08) **The Hunt for Fast 16** - Jags digs up the malware from a public library of suspected code, but reverse-engineering it proves incredibly difficult.
- 5 (09:03) **Stuxnet: The Mother of All Cyber Weapons** - Jags explains the paradigm-shifting Stuxnet attack, which reportedly destroyed Iranian centrifuges by making them look normal on computer screens.
- 6 (12:48) **AI to the Rescue** - Jags uses new AI tools to crack the Fast 16 puzzle, assigning the task to his colleague Vitali Kamluk.
- 7 (15:45) **Who Messes With Math?** - The malware targets the part of a computer that does complex calculations, essentially telling it "two plus two equals five."
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Show Notes
The U.S. and Israel have long been in conflict with Iran over their nuclear development program. Some of that conflict has been out in the open, with bombs and blockades, but some of it has been invisible.
Recently some security researchers discovered a cyberweapon likely tied to that invisible conflict. It looks like it was designed to hide on nuclear scientists computers, then throw off their calculations--just as they got close to achieving their goals.
Sounds like something out of science fiction. But it was created 20 years ago.
On today’s show: a whodunit about hackers, ‘Cyber Paleontologists’, spy-vs-spy protocols, cryptic intelligence leaks, nuclear physics, high-precision math, and epistemological warfare.
Pictured: Juan Andres Guerrero Saade (JAGS) and his ‘Fast16 - NOTHING TO SEE HERE, CARRY ON’ tattoo.
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This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain and Erika Beras. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Charlotte Isidore and engineered by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Music: NPR Source Audio - “High Tech Expert,” “Digital Wave,” and “Hyper Pop.”
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